PERC Youth Committee Statement on International Migrants Day

16 December 2016: 18th of December is a UN International Migrants Day.

Migration is a complex phenomenon in the modern world. Globalization, together with other aspects, has greatly increased the number of people who move to other places. The number of migrants is increasing every day.

According to the new study of ILO migrant workers account for 150.3 million of the world’s approximately 232 million international migrants. Many of them are economic migrants who move from developing countries to developed countries and mainly represent low paid work force. Another significant part of migrants are refugees and displaced people from conflict regions, who are forced to immigrate.

Migrants are moving from their homelands to destination countries to improve their life conditions, as their countries do not provide protection of their minimum human rights (decent working conditions, health care, housing and etc). Unfortunately, in most cases instead of finding a better life, migrant workers face horrible conditions and are victims of labor exploitation and forced labor. A significant part of them are young people.

As the problem is widespread, it is obvious that the challenges and difficulties of international migration require enhanced cooperation and collective action of countries and regions.
PERC Youth Committee defined migration as one of its priorities.
The Committee underlines that it is extremely important:

• to create policies providing equal treatment, non-discrimination, fair recruitment and decent working conditions for migrants; (especially for vulnerable groups);
• to fight against labour exploitation, trafficking and precariousness at work ;
• to promote fundamental labor standards for migrant workers through application of ILO, UN and Council of Europe conventions.
We do believe that with common efforts we can achieve decent working conditions for migrants.